Answer:Everything is relative – what are we
shooting for?Do we want America to
look like it did when European explorers discovered her?Wild, beautiful, foreboding, full of life,
promise, and almost certain danger?Or
do we want her to look like she did when the Pilgrims first tried the
philosophy of communism to make her prosper?Death and malaise were everywhere in that commune, with starvation and
disease at the top of the list of killers.Or, how about when they decided that the whole communist thing wasn’t
working out, so perhaps individuals should be responsible for their own
property and receive the benefits from their own labors individually?Wonder how that looked – check it out in the
history books.Then of course came
those pesky Founders with their ideas about how individuals could be guaranteed
freedom from an oppressive government, and that sparked the war that would end
in the establishment of the best set of documents to define a nation ever
devised.What did the country look like
when all that was going on?

No
sooner had individual rights and individual states given birth to the union
than the warts started to show up on the face of America.All people were NOT free, and it could not
be abided!What did America look like
then?War causes people to abuse the
land and the people who try to defend it – it causes wounds that never heal,
memories that never fade, and history that should never be forgotten – lest it
should ever happen again.

But
a scarred and torn America did bind up her wounds and survive even such an
ordeal.

Then,
what did the country look like?

For
the next century, she toiled and beckoned to the rest of the world to learn the
meaning of true liberty and the price to be paid – and they came in droves –
immigrants from other places in the world that never learned the secrets of
individual freedom, prosperity, and responsibility.Age old cultures – proud cultures, that had not produced the
wisdom of this New World in all their centuries of existence were bleeding
their best and brightest, their bravest and most willing citizens, who knew
there must be a better way.America was
the answer to so many dreams!What did
she look like then?

America’s
growing pains continued to produce problems – and answers for every one of
them.This was the “real promised
land.”This was “one nation under God”
– and that was the difference.That was
the common thread in all those faces of America.She had been blessed.That is what she really looked like!

That
doesn’t mean that everyone who came here even believed in God, but it does mean
that God believed in America!This was
the first place in human history that had taken His law as its own, and
tirelessly inscribed it into the very foundation of this nation!

It
wasn’t until those folks who didn’t believe in God and started to throw their
weight around that America begin to falter.Such is the story of human failing and the fall of nations.

America
as she looked under God’s law – maybe that’s what we should be shooting for,
huh?Before individualism was lost in
collectivism, before morality was lost in relativism, before intelligence was
lost in “enlightened” philosophy, before souls were lost in squalor – that is
what America should look like!

Everybody’s
got the answer and it usually includes references to one party or another, one
religion or another, one philosophy or another, or one form of government or
another.Hey, we’ve already proven we
could live and prosper with a multitude of differences within our borders –
that is, as long as we do not allow the infringement of basic, individual
rights!Once we open the door for
government to solve our philosophical or political disputes, we give up those
individual rights.

Thanks,
all you non-believers who thought it would be a good idea to show God the door
all those decades ago.Now we’ve raised
a couple of generations who don’t appreciate the “real promised land” they
would have inherited.Now, we’ve come
full circle back to the failed communist ideal of spreading the wealth.What wealth?That communist ideal is squandering the real wealth of our
nation!

As
we celebrate Independence Day, perhaps we should ask another question: